Religious Styles of Architecture in Chinatown
By Dana Logan
Walking along Mott St. in Chinatown NYC, the storefront temple and the old Catholic
church distinguish themselves as religious space that is unified by architectural form and
yet distinctive in its religious use. The casual observers stop and stare at the strangeness
of the phenomena and the long-term residents walk by with disregard. This variance in
experience is happening because Chinatown is truly a mixed-use development, in the
sense that tourism, industry, immigration, and gentrification are all happening right now
in the same space. The Church of Grace for Fujianese, the Church of Transfiguration, and
the Sung Tak Buddhist Association are examples of the type of religious space this paper
will touch on. They are part of the multi-layered experience of Chinatown because they
are unified by a vernacular style that is dependent on the reworking of downtown
immigrant institutions into Chinese religious buildings. This style is due not only to the
Chinese community that built them, but also the interaction with the texture and history
of New York. The vernacular form is also, as this paper will show, a product of contrast
and disruption within the gaze of New York City tourism. The web of religious buildings
and facades in Chinatown, when analyzed as a unified discourse, show the parameters
and creativity of religious material expression.
The framework for this paper relies on the use of several key terms and ideas that I use in
reference to the work of Dell Upton and Henry Glassie. Vernacular architecture is more
of a disciplinary method than it is a stable category of buildings. Upton writes, “When
pressed, my preference is to define vernacular architecture not as a category into which
some buildings may be fit and others not, but as an approach to architectural studies that
1
complements more traditional architectural historical inquiries.”1 This “complement” is
in part the inclusion of a category of buildings that have been unnoticed and under
analyzed, as Glassie writes, “When we isolate from the world a neglected architectural
variety and name it vernacular, we have prepared it for analysis. The term marks the
transition from the unknown to the known. The study of vernacular architecture is a way
that we expand the record, bit by bit.”2 This type of project, embraced by earlier
historians like Norman M. Isham and Albert F. Brown3, has been more explicitly used by
Dell Upton and Henry Glassie as method of revealing structures of power and class that
are built into the landscape through architecture. The study of “vernacular architecture”
rests on the premise that buildings that are so woven into our daily experience as to be
“unnoticeable” hold their own secrets and cultural significance.
There is no one method of exploration in the field of “vernacular architecture” studies,
and the framework chosen has ramifications for the nature of one’s conclusions. The
method used in this exploration of Chinatown’s religious buildings will be a “culturally”
oriented study, as opposed to an object oriented, socially oriented, or symbolically
oriented study4. The focus of the project will be on the “architectural competence”, or the
vocabulary that builders work with, and its actual performance in various buildings.
Upton concludes that the value of this type of analysis is that “Tradition is revealed not as
dull mimicry of previous examples but as a shared body of knowledge in which choices
arise out of the tension between individual inclinations and social context.”5 There is also
a complication and futility in this method that must be acknowledged, which comes from
Dell Upton, “The power of things: recent studies in American vernacular architecture” American
Quarterly 35, no. 3. (1983), 262-279.
2
Henry Glassie, Vernacular Architecture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 24.
3
See Norman M. Isham and Albert F. Brown, Early Rhode Island Houses: a Historical and Architectural
Study (Providence: Preston and Rounds, 1895).
4
See Dell Upton “The power of things: recent studies in American vernacular architecture” American
Quarterly 35, no. 3. (1983), 262-279.
5
Glassie, Vernacular Architecture, 274. This type of analysis relies heavily on structuralism. Glassie
demonstrates the use of structuralism in vernacular architecture studies in his essay “Structure and function,
folklore and the artifact,” Semiotica, 7 (1973), 313-51.
1
2
the highly varied social contexts and traditions that contribute to the enclave of
Chinatown, thus expanding the “architectural competence” exponentially. In this
complicated system I hope to locate a few threads of an architectural tradition through the
limited scope of the façade and its relationship to the street. This paper will first try to
locate major historical trends that are the foreground for the contemporary buildings, then
use those historical implications to analyze the relationship of the building to the
neighborhood.
New York before Chinatown
The expression of Chinese religious architecture in the landscape of New York was
influenced by a tradition of New York orientalism that predated the arrival of an actual
Chinese community in the 1800s. The three waves of New York orientalism6 were
typified first by the association of Oriental goods with high social status, followed by the
interest in all things Oriental by the mass culture, and finally ending in an association of
Oriental race with disease, drugs, and uncleanliness. All of these stages were closely
intertwined with various business ventures at the heart of New York City’s economy, but
the last had the most enduring hold on views of Chinatown up to the present.
The impact of popular views of the Orient on the idea of Chinese religion can be seen in
the use of Chinese architectural motif in “The Great Chinese Museum”. Opened in 1849
by John Peters Jr. The historian John Kuo Wie Tchen explains that when John Peters Jr.
showed the objects from his ventures in China as an American diplomat “The exhibition
itself must have been a singular visual experience.”7 This spectacle introduced audiences
6
John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York before Chinatown: orientalism and the shaping of American Culture
1776-1882 (Baltimore, Md: John Hopkins University Press, 1999), 195.
7
Ibid., 114
3
to the experience of the Chinese facade. “The entrance featured Chinese calligraphy
flanking richly carved gold leaf and lacquered panels, as if the visitor were entering a
Chinese temple. The Chinese couplet was translated “Words may deceive, but eyes
cannot play the rouge.” which describes well the way that American audiences were
asked to read and enjoy the colorful facades and foreign symbols of Chinese buildings.
The advent of an actual community of Chinese, mostly sailors, in the heart of Downtown
Manhattan created a new array of buildings for white Americans to contend with and
Chinese to relate to. Wo Kee, an “enterprising Hong Kong merchant” moved his store to
34 Mott St. in 1873. The move above Chatham Square was to be quickly followed by the
first set of businesses and organizations to constitute “Chinatown”. The Mutual Aid
Association at 12 Baxter Street provided a social space for eating, gambling, and hearing
news from abroad. It was also the home of the first community shrine. The New York
Times and Harpers both reported on these spaces which they described as “a badly
lighted, musty room, some 20 feet long by 12 wide,”8 From the street could be seen a
high altar between a pair of large lanterns suspended from the ceiling. Brass censors
burning incense, a pair of stuffed birds, and a kerosene lamp were observed on the alter
table in front of a portrait described as “Buddha, his song, and the evil one” by the New
York Times. Whether or not the description of the space was accurate, it reveals the
interest that the New York journalists assumed their audience had for the Chinese
religious curiosities. Like the “Great Chinese Museum” the first storefronts of the real
Chinatown were exciting and interesting as minor entertainment for all New Yorkers, no
longer reserving the exotic Orient for parlors of the upper class.
Chinatown also found religious space in the missions and churches of lower Manhattan.
These organizations founded in Chinatown were optimistic about their ability to
8
Tchen, New York before Chinatown: orientalism and the shaping of American Culture 1776-1882, 114.
4
accomplish two main goals with Chinese in New York: the reform and conversion of
downtown immigrants, and the use of Chinese New Yorkers in the conversion of Chinese
in China. English language classes were a useful tool in this task as the Chinese, unlike
other immigrants, were mostly unable to speak with their fellow New Yorkers and were
hungry for language instruction. The Five Points Mission was built in 1853 by the Fourth
Avenue Presbyterian Church to represent “an outpost dedicated to the moral cleansing of
the polyglot port-culture district”9 reached out to the Chinese population by hosting
annual Chinese New Years celebrations. These celebrations were soon replaced with a
“Christmas Reunion”, in 1870 in which Chinese foods and Christmas tree decorations
were both present. For uptown society, the visibility of Christian Chinese in New York
increased rapidly as members of churches easily found work as house servants in
Christian households10.
The implications of this history for the future styles of religious architecture in
Chinatown are two-fold. First, the trappings of Chinese religion were established as
visually exotic and worthy of voyeurism during the foundation laying years of
Chinatown. Second, because of missionary relations with Chinatown the presence of
Christianity was an important element of both internal religious practice in Chinatown
and non-resident understanding of morality in Chinatown.
Chinatown architecture
The built environment of Chinatowns all over the United States followed a generalized
form.
9
John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York before Chinatown: orientalism and the shaping of American Culture
1776-1882 (Baltimore, Md: John Hopkins University Press, 1999), 239.
10
Ibid.
5
Chinatowns tended to be composed of standard American commercial and tenement
buildings altered to suit a male community—mainly multiple storied commercial
buildings containing residential hotels for single men as well as commercial and
institutional spaces. They were usually located at the edge of the central business district,
where cheap housing was available close to employment opportunities. During most of
the 19th century little effort was made to make these buildings look like buildings in
China because the structures, overall shapes, settings and social situations were so
different in the United States. Shops would occupy the ground floors, with storage,
clubrooms and gambling establishments squeezed into the basements.11
The resistance of those tenement and multi-storied commercial buildings to Chinese-style
renovation became, however, the very formula for a Chinatown vernacular style. With
the inability to shift two major aspects of a building in the Chinese tradition, the frame
and the foundation (add footnote), the roof became the malleable aspect for renovation in
pre-existing buildings. While the distinctive overhangs and brackets of Chinese roof
design were originally aspects of a holistic design of a buildings frame, they are easily
attached as superficial (in the sense of non-structural) elements. The combination of these
details on distinctive downtown cheap buildings would become a signature style for
Chinatown.
As Chinatown grew after WWII, with the lifting of the exclusion act that had separated so
many Chinese American families, this distinctive style began to characterize buildings
and institutions in the enclave. More religious spaces were created and many lower east
side churches received an influx of Chinese members. This shift foregrounds certain
conditions, like the continuing immigration of Chinese, which would continue to
formulate the “look” of Chinatown’s religious architecture into the present. The image of
Chinatown in the 1940’s through 1990’s, including the secular and religious architectural
forms of Chinatown, created a standard that is already becoming contested and reworked
by new generations of immigrants and New York Chinese-Americans, into a new
vernacular form.
Chris Yip, America’s architectural roots: ethnic groups that built America Dell Upton Ed. (New York:
John Wiley, 1995), 106.
11
6
Community, city, and private design initiatives in Chinatown have changed in response to
the self-image and economy of the enclave. The tension that has sparked the various
changes has been between the need to attract tourists with an appealing Chinese culture
and the need to respect the authenticity of a working class neighborhood. Miniature
pagodas appeared on the phone booths in the 1960's as a marketing scheme of the phone
booth company. The pagoda phone booths fit into the scheme already standardized by
Chinatown’s McDonald’s, which was decorated with gold ornament and pagoda roof
details. The pagoda facades on phone booths, fast food chains, and banks, with the
distinctive gold and red roofs, have come to signify Chinatown over the past forty years
to tourists. These attempts to market a Chinatown aesthetic were not however taken up by
community and city planners who saw the use of Chinese facade design as unauthentic.
The pagoda phone booths came down in 1995 when the company responded to the
Chinatown History Museum's opinion that “you can't just reduce an entire culture to a
symbol”12.
The most telling sign of community ambivalence to tourist-oriented Chinese symbolism
might be the absence of a Chinatown welcoming arch. Most Chinatowns in the United
States, despite dwindling enclave culture have erected and maintained an Arch with
Chinese writing and bold Chinese detailing that signifies the beginning of the Chinese
quarter. The effects of 9/11 on the economy of Chinatown changed the community
opinion on this kind of visual reference. In response to the lack of tourism and business
after the terrorism, the City of New York and the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent
Association embarked on plans to revitalize Chinatown and draw non-residents back to
the enclave.13 The plan included the building of visual references that would seem exotic
12
“So long, it's been good pagoda” Village Voice. September 5 th, 1995.
13
Chinatown seeking a rebirth. Newsday, Monday, August 22, 2005. LMDC Calls for Help to Remagnetize
Chinatown. The New York Sun. Wed. August 20 2003
7
and appealing to tourists. A 1.5 million arch was designed pro-bono by Tieh-Chi Ho to be
built across Park Row at Chatham Square. The design, in comparison to the highly ornate
Philadelphia and Washington D.C. gates, is very simple but is larger than any other city's
Chinatown arch at 45 feet high and 80 feet wide14.
Another visual response to the lack of post-9/11 business is the plum blossom lighting
plan. The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association has installed “year-round festive
lighting on most of Chinatown's main streets to make the area more visitor friendly”. The
press release explained, “The key design element in Winter Lights is the plum blossom, a
flower that blooms in the winter months. In addition to its natural beauty, the plum
blossom symbolizes strength and perseverance in adversity. Since the plum blossom
blooms the earliest of any flower, even braving patches of snow, it also symbolizes
optimism and renewal.”15 This new type of visual and verbal advertising has been an
attempt to sell Chinatown as a place to come for cultural enrichment. Other than
restaurants, the community lacks much activity for tourists, leaving the process of taking
in an atmosphere as the prime draw.
With the declining interest in going to a “slum”, as orientalism manifested itself in
Chinatown for most of the 20th century, the effort to “clean up” the streets for tourists has
been parallel to a growing visual representation of Chinese culture in what the Museum
for Chinese Americans deems as “essentialized”. The inclusion of religious sites as the
new main attraction in the post-9/11 efforts links Chinatown with a feeling of “culture”
that is moral, colorful, and festive.
14
Chinatown finally gets its arch lift. Daily News Wednesday, April 6 th 2005
15
Plum Blossom Lighting to Illuminate Streets of Chinatown. Daily News Thursday, December 12 2002
8
Religious Buildings in Chinatown
Foremost on the publicized tours of Chinatown is the Catholic Church of the
Transfiguration on Mott St. The Church was originally home to the Zion English
Lutheran Church, and later an Anglican parish. Bought by the Roman Catholics from the
Anglican parish, the church was run by a highly influential Cuban priest who framed the
church as the “Church of Immigrants”.16 The church served a mostly Italian community
but also ministered to Chinese. In the wake of the massive 1950's immigration of Chinese
to New York the church began to offer sermons in Chinese. Today the church is used
mostly by Chinese and holds services in Mandarin and Cantonese. Chinese children from
all different religions, including Buddhism, attend the school attached to the church.
The church is in the design of its original English Lutheran parish with elegant tall
windows and a green copper steeple (see image 1). Exemplary of the historical styles that
the city has made a point of preserving, it is untouched by Chinese motif and decoration.
Color in Chinatown is a prime mode of announcement, and in the case of the church, the
lack of color is just as effective. The brown stone pulls the building back from the action
of the street giving it a sense of heavy disengagement. Color also plays a part in the sense
of antiquity that the building exudes. The use of copper in the steeple, which has since
become green, is a sign of its prestige and age. These details refer to a more ambiguous
monumentality: that of the government and its style of building, which is easily
referenced in the near by City Hall district. The English church architecture contrasts and
negates the style of Chinatown and in doing so creates a specific type of spectacle that is
rooted in the illusion of immunity from change, which the church presents in the context
of colorful Mott St. Although the façade of the original building is stable, the school
attached to it instantly integrates the community (see image 2). Through Chinese script
David Dunlap Legacy, Glory in Gotham: Manhattan’s houses of worship: a guide to their history, and
architecture (New York City: City and Co., 2001), 44.
16
9
on its sign and its intermediary style of white cement, the style is reminiscent of the
stonework of the church but softer and more functionally akin to the brick tenements next
door.
In the framework of New York orientalism, which sees Chinatown as a site of contagion
and uncleanliness, the church is a symbol of an intervening force. The architecture is a
testament to the inability of Chinatown motif to transform all that is in its parameters.
This however is an illusion, of use to the tourism industry and those who are nostalgic for
the Lower East Side before Chinatown radically spread to overtake the traditional
boundaries. It is a building that is still described as a “Latin Immigrant” church by
popular guides to the city17 despite its overwhelming use as a Chinese community center.
In contrast to the unchanged structure of the Church of Transfiguration, the True Light
Lutheran Church is exemplary of the vernacular style that transforms American motif
through the use of Chinese motif. The tall building is an urban space that has been
adapted from a narrow tenement to a provocative Lutheran church (see image 3). The
roof of the building is softened and annulled by the superficial overhang motif from the
Chinese tradition of tailiang18 framework. The tall brick front exterior is the frame for a
large reveal of a cross, which hovers above the red doors of the church. Both the cross
reveal and the doors are of particular stylistic heritage, leading to a beautiful synthesis of
traditions, context, and imagination.
The reveal, as an exterior motif, is a development of modern architecture that solves the
problem of ornamentation without using classical western images and shapes that draw a
building towards traditionalism. In the United States, congregations building churches
17
Legacy, Glory in Gotham, 44.
Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt, Traditional Chinese Architecture (New York City: China Institute in
America, 1984), 11. The Tailiang framework is utilitarian response to the need to carry rainwater off eaves.
The style has developed into a highly ornamental affair that distinguishes classical Chinese architecture
through its use.
18
10
after the Second World War often choose the modernist aesthetic and the use of reveal in
those churches was very prominent, as symbols such as the cross were integrated through
brickwork or concrete. The use of reveal in this Chinatown church shows some of the
same instincts as it solves the problem of remodeling the exterior of a brick tenement into
a religious space with minimal effort19 while utilizing the material of brick as a sculptural
form.
The red doors of the church are slightly disconcerting in their use of color and detail as
they are juxtaposed against the very urban American motif of the brick reveal. Like the
motif on the roof of the eaves, they announce the church as undeniably Chinese. In this
church we can see the layering of styles absent in the stable Church of the
Transfiguration. The layers of style: brick, red paint, green eaves, do not imitate or
inspire American public buildings as so many churches did in the dawn of American
cities20. Instead the layers refer to residential, commercial, and tourist oriented buildings
that crowd together new immigrants and titillate outsiders. The True Light Lutheran
Church stylistically does not recede from the streetscape as historical churches like the
Church of the Transfiguration do.
The Sung Tak Buddhist Association stylistically is akin to the True Light Lutheran
Church in its use of layering and transformation of materials. Originally a Jewish
synagogue, the building at 13 Pike St. near East Broadway was the home of B’nai Israel
Kalwarie (Sons of Israel) and was designed by Alfred E. Badt in 1904. The building was
in the style of a handful of other New York synagogues built before it. “Known as the
Kalvarier Schul, or Pike St. Schul, its façade is dominated by tall slender Romanesque
arched windows recalling the synagogues of Shaaray Tefila, 160 West 82nd St, and
19
The façade of a brick tenement can be transformed at minimal cost by putting another thin layer of
brickwork on top of the original. The new layer may then by manipulated to make reveals of symbols.
20
Craig Zabel and Susan Scott ed., American Public Architecture: European roots and native expressions
(University Park, PA: Penn State University, 1989), 10.
11
Kehilath Jeshuran, 117 East 85th St.” The congregation became increasingly smaller until
in the 1970’s the synagogue was abandoned, and the building became derelict in its
disuse (though it also was a designated landmark and thus safe from demolition).
In 1994 the Sung Tak Buddhist Association bought the building and transformed it into
one of Chinatown’s most prominent temples and architectural gems. The Romanesque
façade is made further imposing by a double stairway leading to a front balcony that then
leads into the building (see image 4). Creating three layers of the building’s form, a street
level door and windows sits under the balcony, while the main level is separated from the
top by a separate set of windows. The changes that the Buddhists have made to the
outside of the building have utilized all these existing features by transforming the top
level into residential quarters, transforming the bottom level into a commercial area with
a little shop, and using the balcony as the setting for a large incense burner. A large statue
of the Buddhist goddess Quanyin has been placed along side the door on the wide
balcony. These changes have made the building a bustling center of activity as people
visit, shop and gawk at the well displayed rituals performed on the balcony which looks
over one of the busiest streets coming off of East Broadway.
Like the True Light Lutheran, the Sung Tak Buddhist association is notable for a
juxtaposition of styles, tradition, and usage. The easy melding of commercial, residential,
and religious space transforms the synagogue that was once so stylistically isolated from
its neighboring buildings, more akin to the nature of the neighboring tenements in its
basic structure of living space above retail space. The remodeled building also plays on
the Romanesque grandeur of the original façade by making the Quanyin in the same
stone material and placing her within the symmetry of the buildings existing ornament.
The stairways leading up the balcony become almost processional as people ascend and
descend from the ritual incense burner.
12
The Sung Tak Buddhist Temple is part of the constant expansion of Chinatown into the
Lower East Side, and the use of traditional Jewish and Italian spaces has become
distinguished in a very specific stylistic overlay. Whether it is tenements, synagogues,
municipal or private business buildings, the religious spaces of Chinatown have managed
to integrate distinctively European immigrant structures into temples and churches. The
Lower East Side has not completely turned into the new annex of Chinatown however,
and the specific aesthetic of this intermediary neighborhood is also distinguished by the
contrast of remaining European immigrant institutions and emerging Chinese ones. Many
synagogues in the neighborhood, for instance, have remained in use and are actively
preserved by strong Lower East Side initiatives. These synagogues, like the Eldridge St.
Synagogue, stand in striking contrast to the Fuzhounese restaurants and shops that now
dominate the neighborhood.
The Church of Grace for Fuzhounese congregation is made up of people from the
province of Fuzhou in Southwest China who have been immigrating to Chinatown in
mass numbers since the 1980's and continues to arrive today. They have recently
surpassed the Cantonese as Chinatowns' leading ethnic group.21 Most come from rural
areas and journeyed to Chinatown to join a community of relatives and friends who have
already migrated from their village in Southeast China. The link between certain villages
in Fuzhou and Chinatown are very strong and the wages earned in America are fueling
the migration of more relatives everyday. Fuzhounese immigrants face considerable
obstacles in their transition to American life. The cultural and economic divide is large
between Chinatown residents who have lived in Chinatown since the 1940's and 50's, and
have developed strong businesses and organizations in the neighborhood, and the newly
immigrated Fuzhounese. Language is one of those obstacles as the Fujianese dialect is
21
Kenneth Guest, Laminas Youth among Fuzhou Chinese Tony Carnes ed., Asian American Religion: the
making and remaking of borders and boundaries (New York City: New York University Press, 2004), 57.
13
not largely known in Chinatown and most Fuzhounese speak neither English nor
Cantonese.22
The architecture in which this tradition of Chinese Protestantism grew up is important in
understanding the way that it has manifested in Chinatown today. Early missionaries in
China along with other administrative powers brought with them western architects to
create the western outposts. Within the treaty ports and other foreign concessions and
missions, foreign architects designed mostly in an eclectic variety of the revivalist styles
fashionable in the West and elsewhere during the last half of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, strongly reflecting the architectural ambitions of their colonial
patrons and providing architectural familiarity23.
As conversion became more successful with the outreach of Chinese missionaries who
could convert their kinfolk and speak Chinese certain aspects of Christianity became
22
Protestantism is part of the cultural heritage that most Fuzhounese bring to Chinatown. After China's
defeat in the Opium wars (1839-1842), Fuzhou was among the first five ports opened to trade by the
British. The missionaries soon came to China for the first time and Fuzhou was one of their first inroads.
The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign missionaries, sent by the American Board of
Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) arrived in Fuzhou in 1847. They were quickly followed by
the U.S. Methodist Episcopal Mission and the British Anglicans in 1850 and lastly by the YMCA in 1905
(John King Fairbanks, The Great Chinese Revolution 1800-1985) Missionary work was not a wild success
in China in general due in part to the unflattering association of the churches with imperialist foreign policy
and the inability of missionaries to learn Chinese.
The success of Christianity in Fuzhou came through the indigenous development of Protestantism by
Chinese evangelists who created their own denominations. John Sung founded the Home of Grace, the
denomination of the Church of Grace in Chinatown. Sung was educated at Ohio Wesleyan University but
returned to China to stage revivals and preach a very personal devotion to God. After the Communist
Revolution the church found its self in a precarious position with the government. Resistant to the ThreeSelf Patriotic Movement backed by the Communist government, the House of God and Little Flock
churches were closed and the congregations became under-ground and met in residences. In 1978 the
Communist party restored the policy of freedom of religious belief and by 1979 four of the thirteen
churches to first be reopened were in Fujian Province.
23
Peter G Rowe and Seng Kuan, Architectural encounters w/ essence and form in modern China
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 30.
14
more popular, including the formality of ritual and the idea of transcendence. For
Protestant Chinese, architecture was one of the traditions introduced by the missionaries
that seemed to stick.
As congregations acquired their own chapels, however, there was a trend toward more
formal ritual and an emphasis on religious decorum. Men and women had their separate
entrances to the chapel and there was segregated seating with a screen separating the
sexes. Among certain Christians there eventually developed a deep attachment to
traditional rituals and even Western church architecture. 24
In churches, this impulse resulted in buildings almost indistinguishable from their
western counterparts when American architects drew up plans for Chinese churches of
many denominations without even traveling to the region. For example, the gothic revival
style Xujiahui Catholic church in Shanghai follows this pattern of implanted church
architecture with little alteration for its regional situation. Even when western church
architects came to China to live and practice full time, little about their work changed or
responded to their new environment.25 This trend was less closely followed in the Fuzhou
province where Protestantism blossomed at the turn of the century. In 1915 rural
churches like the Methodist church built in a village south of Fuzhou, through the
financial investment of the Chinese congregation and the foreign mission, demonstrated a
new style. Elegant plain brickwork set off three main features: the windows, the door,
and the sign. This simple equation highlighted the Chinese script of the sign and the
delicate brickwork around the windows and sign that were a product of the
congregation’s own design.26
The Church of Grace for Fuhzounese is an interesting extension of that architectural
moment in 1915 Fuzhou Province. Inhabiting and effectively transforming a Municipal
24
Ku Wei-Ying and Koen De Ridder ed. Authentic Chinese Christianity: preludes to its development (19th
and 20th centuries) (Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2001), 72.
25
Rowe and Seng, Architectural encounters with essence and form in modern China, 33.
Ryan Dunch, Fuscous Protestants and the Making of a Modern China 1857-1927 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2004), 151.
26
15
Bath house on the edge of “Chinatown” proper in the Lower East Side, the Church of
Grace is a white building with lattice bars over the windows, a skinny cross on the ridge
of the flat roof, and a Bible over the door (see image 5). The Church of Grace utilizes an
aesthetic of minimalism that is at once congruent with the simple protestant aesthetic
developed in the villages of the Fuzhou Province and divergent in its ability to transform
an urban space. The original Municipal Bathhouse invokes social authority through the
elegant urban municipal form that was used as a place for immigrants to bath and connect
with social welfare programs in the late 19th century.
Like the previous religious spaces of Chinatown mentioned, the Church of Grace is part
of a tradition of exterior transformation, but it is also an exception to some of those
buildings trends. The Church of Grace, like the others, has extended the materials of the
building into new ornament to make the space its own, but in this case the extension is
the shared aesthetic of previous and current users. The style of the original building is
equivalent to Fuzhou protestant architecture in material, spatial configuration, and
exterior detail. More specifically, the original building and the Fuzhou protestant style
both use unornamented brick work with gentle detailing around the front windows and
door, a prominent sign above the door in plain script and the promise of an unbroken
large space in the interior that is instantly accessible from the street. The similarities are
not coincidental. Fuzhou protestant architecture was rooted in the tradition of the YMCA
mission, which worked hard to promote the ideal of a religious space as an unornamented
“social” space that catered to the whole citizen through sports, youth and senior activities,
and education. The Church of Grace serves very similar purposes in New York for its
Fuhzounese members who need social services only the church is equipped to provide.
Function, shared history, and aesthetic compatibility combine to make a natural home for
this growing Chinatown institution.
16
The Church of Grace, the True Light Lutheran Church, the Sung Tak Buddhist
Association, and the Church of the Transformation are connected by the architectural
overlay manifested in their facades. While representing different religious aesthetics,
different levels of public visibility, and different moments in Chinatown’s history, these
buildings create a broader visual experience that shows the enduring importance of
“overlay” to the creation of broader categories of American vernacular architecture.
Further Reading:
Abu-Lughod. 1994. From Urban Village to East Village: the battle for New York’s lower
east side. Cambridge MA: Blackwell Publishers.
Cao, NL. 2005. The church as a surrogate family for working class immigrant Chinese
youth: ethnography of segmented assimilation. Sociology of Religion, 66, 2:183-200.
Ebaugh, Helen Rose, and Chaufetz, Janet Saltzman, eds. 2000. Religion and the New
Immigrants: Continuities and Adaptations in Immigrant Congregations. Walnut Creek.
CA: Altamira Press.
Ebaugh, Helen Rose, and Chaufetz, Janet Saltzman, eds. 2002. Religion across Borders.
Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.
Guest, Kenneth J. 2003. God in Chinatown: religion and survival in New York’s evolving
immigrant community. New York: New York University Press.
Jones, Lindsay. The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture.
Kim, RY. 2005. God in Chinatown: Religion and survival in New York's evolving
immigrant community. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 73, 3: 929-931.
Kuo, Chia-ling. 1977. Social and Political Change in New York’s Chinatown: the role of
voluntary organizations. New York: Preager.
Kwong, Peter.1987. The New Chinatown. New York: Hill and Wang.
Levitt, Peggy. 2001. The Transnational Villagers. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
17
Light, Ivan; Charles Choy Wong. 1975. Protest or Work: Dilemmas of the tourist
industry in American Chinatowns. The American Journal of Sociology, 80, 6: 1342-1368
Lin, Jan.1998. Reconstructing Chinatown: Ethnic enclave, global change. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Portes, Alejandro. 1999. Introduction: Pitfalls and Promise of an Emergent Research
Field. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22, 2:217-238.
Portes, Alejandro. 1997. Immigration Theory for a New Century: some problems and
opportunities. International Migration Review, 31, 4:799-825.
Warner, Stephen R. and, Wittner, Judith G. 1998. Gatherings in Diaspora: Religious
Communities and the New Immigration. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Wong, Scott K. 1995. Chinatown: Conflicting Images, Contested Terrain. MELUS, 20, 1:
3-15.
Wong, Bernard P.1982. Chinatown, economic adaptation and ethnic identity of the
Chinese (New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Yuan, D.Y. 1963. Voluntary Segregation: A study of New Chinatown. Phylon, 24, 3:255265.
Zhou, Min. 1992. Chinatown: The socioeconomic potential of an urban enclave.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Zhou, Min; John R. Logan. 1991. New York City’s Chinatown. Social Forces, 70, 2:387407.
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